A Week Later

• I’ve got lots to blog about (decorating!!), and now that we’re having sunny days, maybe I can get good photos so I can actually get some of those posts up here.
• Thanksgiving was great.
• Civilization IV*, a PC game released in 2005, was on sale for $5 at Best Buy on Black Friday.  It does, in fact, run quite well on Vista.  Any guesses as to what my new addiction might be?
• I am finding such joy in decorating the house for the holidays this year.  (My other addiction at the mo’.)
• Thrift stores are fabulous resources for Christmas decorations.  Why spend $0.99 for seven replacement lightbulbs, or $1.99 for a brand-new strings of lights, when you can pay $1.99 (and less on sale days) for a used, but working-perfectly string of lights at the thrift store?  Thrifting = recycling.
• I need to check the calendar and find out when Hanukkah is this year.  We try to light the menorah with the kids but always forget until about halfway through.  Or, we start out fine and forget after the first couple of nights.
• We’re flying to Atlanta on Solstice, so I don’t think we’ll be doing a Solstice tree this year.  Sniff.
• I should blog about how our not-so-traditionally-religious family celebrates the holiday season.  (The last couple of bullet points should be a clue.)
• I should also blog about how no one’s trying to “steal Christmas,” “eliminate Christmas,” or “declare war on Christmas” when they say “Happy Holidays,” but I have a feeling the people who need to hear the message wouldn’t believe me, anyway.  I bet they’d be even more ticked off if I went around wishing them a Blessed Solstice.

*Is it proper to italicize the name of a video game?  Is it like a movie?  Conventions for these new-fangled-type technologies weren’t discussed in my high school English classes.

Tuesday

• I didn’t turn my computer on all weekend, which suited me fine at the time, but I still felt compelled to catch up on the tweeting, facebooking, and RSS’ing of it all yesterday and today.
• I found a couple of new-to-me blogs here and here, and I’m enjoying wasting time being inspired by them.
• If we had had any doubts about the move across country (which we hadn’t), they would have been washed away over the past few days of parent-teacher conferences.  The boys are excelling, and Nicolas, especially, is making more progress academically than I have ever seen him do.  I am so proud.
• I found the fabric I wanted for the boys’ room on clearance for $1.99/yd at Ikea and foam core at half price at Michael’s this weekend.  Nifty simple pelmet, here we come!
• Ironic Thanksgiving story of the year: We are having our first vegetarian Thanksgiving this year, having been graciously invited to a friend of a friend’s house on the big day.  I promised Jason some Turkey on Saturday, so I bought a breast when they were on sale a couple of weeks ago.  Yesterday, a friend who doesn’t cook turkey called to offer us the free one she’d received at the grocery store.  Today, Jason won a free one at work.  We are overrun (in a totally blessed way!) with turkeys.  (Which are being stored at our friends’ house, because they have a stand-alone freezer, and we have the smallest freezer known to humankind.)  They will come in very handy for dinners in the New Year.
• I’m excited for Friday.  We’re decorating a little earlier this year than we have in the past, because we’ll be out of town for ten days around Christmastime, and we want to enjoy our decorations for as long as possible.  It was Jason’s suggestion, and I love it.  (I think he would’ve decorated a couple of weeks ago for this reason, but he knew better than to suggest to me that we decorate before Thanksgiving.  Smart man.)
• The latest Muppet video on YouTube has gone insanely viral today (I’ve seen it on three blogs and many more Tweets).  I love it.  It is quintessential, classic Muppet, especially in the very last note of the song and in the little piece directly afterward.

Search Me!

I get a kick out of checking my blog stats.  Don’t we all?  How many people visit each day, where they come from, where they go, which posts are the most popular…and of course, best of all, the search terms.

Given that this blog is mostly about whatever pops into my mind and comes out of my craft room (or would if I had a craft room, which I don’t) on any given day, it’s always amusing to see what search terms lead people to the site.

I’ll give you one guess what the most popular internet search to bring people to In THIS Life is.  Crochet?  Family?  Kids?  Nope.  It’s any combination of the words frosty and fries.  Given the subject of that post, and Jason’s insistence that I’m uniquely warped for enjoying that culinary combination, I find endless amusement that the overwhelming majority of people who find this site through a search engine do so because they’re searching for fries and Frosties.

The second-favorite search term is equally amusing to me: snakes.  I think we’ve established before that I am extremely ophidiophobic.  That people come to my blog looking for “snake food,” “cute snakes,” and with the question “how do snakes stay cool” is rather amusing.  On a similar, but much cuter, reptilian note, 18 people have come here looking for “tutles.”  Apparently I, along with 18 other people, misspelled ‘turtle’ somewhere.

And “circulatory system of an owl?”  Scientific inquiry was the last thing I expected after my post about Twilight last year.

Most of the other search terms make perfect sense.  Things like “plarn crochet,” “star wars valentines mailboxes,” and “solas caomh” all fit rather nicely.  Of course, there’s also the occasional search term that makes my stomach quiver.  There are certain things one would only ever search for on the internet if one had evil intent towards minors.  As one such term began to point people to my blog more and more frequently, I finally realized why a certain post was drawing their unwanted attention, and I changed some of the terms I used it.  Sad how innocent conversation can draw unwanted attention.  (I’m happy to report that since changing that post, precisely zero inappropriate searches have come my way.)

And look, now we have a whole new post, just jam packed with keywords, albeit low-frequency ones.  I wonder what that will do to my stats!

It’s Tuesday Again

• NaBloPoMo?  What’s that?
• Eh, no biggie.  I’m still posting a lot more than I have been in recent months, right?
• Jason’s birthday is Thursday, so I need to go shopping.  I’m making these, which my sister made last week and posted about on Facebook.  I haven’t been able to get them out of my mind since.
• Have I ever mentioned how evil inspirational my sister is?
• We bought the Bailey’s already.  And sampled it.  (Of course.)  It must be in my Top 3 Flavors of All Time.  I can’t think of what the other two would be.
• We got Nicolas’s desk hung in the boys’ bedroom this weekend, and the final boxes of toys unpacked in the playroom.  It’s nice to see rooms coming together.
• Yesterday, we got the video camera I mentioned last week.  It’s nifty, and it’s on sale at Best Buy, Target, and Amazon this week, if anyone’s interested.
• One of my biggest internet pet peeves is automatic music on blogs.  Since I’m usually blog surfing in a quiet, empty house, it scares the crud out of me every time.  When I’m NOT in a quiet, empty house, it usually means I’m listening to Pandora, and random, unexpected songs make the music already playing on my computer sound funny.
• Speaking of Pandora, if you haven’t checked it out yet, do give it a try!
• The sun is breaking out from the clouds.  Eep!  Good time to hit the errands list, so on that note…
• Bye!

12 of 12 – November 2009

Happy Friday the 13th!  I had grand intentions of posting this last night…

Many thanks to Chad for orchestrating, inventing, and continuing to host 12 of 12.

8:49 am – On the walk to school.  We can make it in 11 minutes, if we don’t dawdle, and less if we hurry.

9:01 am – The walk home takes a few minutes longer, because it’s uphill.  (It takes even longer if I stop to take photos of the beautiful foliage.)

11:14 am – Driving to the grocery store.  Seriously, I get to see this amazing view whenever I go out on a clear day.  (This is for all of you who asked why we wanted to move to Seattle “with all that rain.”  Days like this are what make the rain completely worth it.)

11:48 am – Grocery shopping.  Blah.

12:03 pm – Took the long way home, so I could get you a picture of the lake.  That’s Seattle in the distance.

1:44 pm – This is why they call it Fall.  I think we need to rake.  There’s a porch under there somewhere.

2:23 pm – Unpacking boxes.  Slowly but surely…

3:19 pm – Walking to the school, I noticed these beautiful mushrooms growing on the side of our neighbor’s driveway.  They’re huge.

3:41 pm – My companions on the school playground while the boys run and shout for a few minutes.

3:45 pm – It’s a really cool playground.

3:46 pm – Ditto.

3:51 pm – Heading home.

Captain Grandpa & Crew

Happy Veterans’ Day, and a great big thank you to everyone who has been willing to put their safety on the line to protect ours…

…and to their families as well.

Tuesday: Randomize Me

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• My to do list from the weekend was basically ignored.  Other things with higher priority cropped up, so it wasn’t an unproductive weekend, just different from the one I’d had planned.
• #6 – the most important item – was accomplished.
• We decided this weekend to buy a video camera.  We have one we bought when Nicky was about a year old, but at the time, we weren’t able to invest in one of the newfangled-at-the-time-and-therefore-very-pricey digital ones.  Consequence?  We never use it, because we’re spoiled by other forms of modern technology and find it to be a pain to deal with the tapes.  (Plus, we forget.)  Oops.  We don’t want anything fancy, just something lightweight that will take moving pictures.  We’re pretty set on this one.  Look how small it is…tuck it in a purse or pocket and go!
• The kids have no school tomorrow.  Instead of getting out for Columbus Day, they get out for Veterans’ Day.  I like that.
• The kids and I are going to finish tackling the two boxes of still-packed toys tomorrow.
• Did you hear?  We won! (#10)
• I’m almost done with my part of a certain gift for a certain set of recipients, but I can’t go into details here and now.
• It’s a good year to be a Ramblin’ Wreck.  (Okay, it’s always good to be a Ramblin’ Wreck, but this is a particularly good year to be a Ramblin’ Wreck and a football fan.)  Go Jackets!

Faith In the Big Man Up North

I remember very well the childish hope as Christmas approached…hope that Santa would indeed fulfill that otherwise-unattainable wish…of a horse, a very expensive toy, [and later] a car.*  Still, I’m always amused with what the boys come up with.  Most notable this year is Kalen’s desire for this:

Image: The LEGO Group

Yep, that’s the $400 Lego Death Star.  Never mind that he pretty much just plays with the Minifigs all the time & has no patience for building.  Actually, now that I look at the thing, he probably wants it simply for all the Minifigs that come with it.  (Bingo!  He just snuck up behind me, and I couldn’t Alt-Tab out in time.  He’s now rattling on about all the cool people that come with it.)

Nicolas’s best request this year is for Astro Boy, the new-to-theaters movie, on DVD.  When I informed him that it wouldn’t be available on DVD in time for Christmas, he said, “Well, Santa will just have to do it, then.”  I don’t know if he still believes in Santa, if he’s hedging his bets and letting us think he does, or if he’s like his mom…wanting to believe in Santa, no matter what.

(Oh, and I think I’ll re-dub NaBloPoMo “NaBLOWPoMo,” since I blew it.  Oh well, 29 posts in 30 days!  I can do it!)

*I’m one of those people who has a small part of them still wishing Santa was a real-live guy with a real-live workshop, able to fulfill my every holiday dream, so it’s not that far-fetched for me to have wished Santa could have brought me a car when I was fifteen.

PhotoHunt: Veterans/Military

The Three Soldiers
at the Vietnam Memorial
17 May, 2009
~*~

PhotoHunt is a weekly meme posted by tnchick, where followers search their photographs for one to match the theme.  As I’m feeling spectacularly uncreative and not at all wordy tonight, I turn to PhotoHunt for blogging inspiration.

Weekend Checklist

The weekend is [almost] here!

I’ve had it about up to here* with the house still needing quite a bit of unpacking and organizing, so I’m making some specific goals for this weekend.

1. Find a place for everything in the kitchen.  There are about 7 smallish items for which I haven’t yet found homes.
2. Mop the kitchen/dining area floors.  Somehow, the house has the gall to get dirty before I’ve even managed to get everything unpacked.
3. Unpack & find places for the two still-packed bins of toys.
4. Hang Nicolas’s desk.
5. Create a mud-room like area in the garage.  There’s not enough room by the front door for all the rain boots & such.
6. Play with my family!

It’s not a particularly ambitious list, but if I manage to knock it all off, I’ll be content.  I’d like to spend about as much time on #6 as the rest combined, if possible.  I think it’s possible.

*Hand held at about chin level.  Maybe nose level.  Depends on when you ask me.